Feminism’s Unfinished Business (Editorial: 3/98)
Twenty years ago, I was coming of age as “second-wave feminism” was hitting its stride. A national Equal Rights Amendment seemed like a do-able accomplishment and helped galvanize activists. The UN had recently declared International Women’s Year, and women were empowered by participating in a movement whose numbers seemed to swell every year.
Feminism was revived. The “first-wave” feminists had achieved passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote. But the voting public was still largely middle- and upper-class, and didn’t produce the revolutionary change that socialist suffragists had sought. And since so much effort had been focused on suffrage, once it was obtained, activism dwindled until it was all but non-existent.
Putting Our Mouths Where the Money Is, (3/98)
In a climate of growing private investment and free trade worldwide, combined with shrinking international foreign assistance budgets, women have more reasons than ever to understand and be concerned about macroeconomic development. So says Ritu Sharma, director of the newly organized Women’s EDGE: The Coalition for Women’s Economic Development and Global Equality. A revitalization of the former Coalition for Women in Development, Women’s EDGE was started in Washington, DC, last March to take on global macroeconomics. As Sharma explains, “We felt that it was important as a women’s community to essentially put our mouths where the money is. And the money is in private investment and trade.”
Back to the Margins (3/98)
In the long struggle between Iraq and the US, Iraqi women have been the most harmed of that nation’s beleaguered masses. Like men, of course, they’ve lost opportunities and seen their living standard plummet. But they’ve also been forced into social contracts which they thought ended a century ago.Seven years of sanctions have desiccated more than bombs could. The casualties include not only Iraq’s modern, secular society, with its advanced medical and educational systems, self sufficiency, university research, and child vaccination programs, but also the progressive lives of eight million Iraqi women. Before 1990, Iraq had an exemplary policy of educating women and opening the professions to them. Before the Gulf War, women were found in all sectors of life. But in the years since then, those gains have been reversed.
Standoff in Chiapas (3/98)
Esperanza Aguilar Jimenez is a skinny seven-year-old, all legs and arms in a well-worn, carefully patched, poofy-skirt dress. She sits next to me on a dusty rock at the side of the road leading into Morelia, her village in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. It’s mid-morning, and Esperanza ought to be in school. But all her teachers are gone. Fearing the imminent advance of the Mexican military, they packed themselves tightly into a little pickup and drove as quickly as they could down the deeply rutted road out of town. I know this because I watched them go.
Activists Prepare for the Next Wave of Protests (3/01)
The Maori people call it Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud. It’s a place of mystery and wonder, where glacial mountain peaks tower over vast coastal rain forests, with breathtaking coves and bays far too numerous to count and genera of trees and birds that can’t be found anywhere else on earth.
New Zealand’s indigenous population has made its mark on the majority colonial population’s language, cultural norms, and legal institutions to an extent rarely found in the English speaking world.